The wealthy entrepreneur builds a perfectly streetable supercar for less than $500,000 and hopes to sell its progeny for $163,840 apiece.

Warren Mosler knows many things. He understands securities and bond trading. He has a plan for advancing the prosperity of the Palestinian state. He will cheerfully explain global macroeconomics until you want to throw yourself into the spinning blades of an Everglades fan boat.

But he doesn't know if the Mosler MT900 will sell.

"What do you think?" the bazillionaire entrepreneur/economist and oft-doubted carbuilder asks, standing by the first copy of his creation.

Well, we don't know, Warren. Let's run the numbers: 2590 pounds, 350 horsepower, 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, 70 mph to a standstill in 149 feet, 12 seconds flat in the quarter-mile, 1.02 g on the skidpad, and on the hand-lettered, gilt-edged sticker is the $163,840 bottom line, should the car ever come to market. Seems like those numbers will add up for a lot of sick-rich players in the exotic-car market.

The down-on-power, unsorted prototype we tested at Sebring during its first weekend of shakedown laps does in fact accelerate quicker, brake harder, and corner sharper than a Ferrari 360 Modena; likewise, it slaps around a Lamborghini Diablo 6.0, then asks for some $136,000 in change. How could the MT900 not sell?

It is poignant that Mosler—a person in whose presence you know, finally, that you are not the smartest guy in the room—doubts his instincts on this score. But Mosler has been slapped around himself in his 15 years of building cars.

Yes, that Mosler, he of the Consulier, Intruder, and Raptor, those super-fast, lightweight, mid-engined sports cars that are routinely banned from endurance racing for being unbeatable, and whose visages are themselves a test of endurance. No one doubts that Mosler can build fast cars. His 45,000-square-foot hobby shop in Riviera Beach, Florida, has amassed a display case full of trophies from places like Sebring, Moroso, and Nelson Ledges. A Lingenfelter-powered Raptor won the 1999 edition of Car and Driver's One Lap of America (before our own Brock Yates decorously disinvited Mosler from the 2000 soiree). In fact, Mosler is building a full-race version of the new car, the MT900R, to compete in the 24 Hours of Daytona, to yet again affirm his carbuilding acumen.

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The issue is one of aesthetics. Mosler's cars have been, heretofore, just ugly. Mosler, slightly anguished and bemused, doesn't understand it. "I like the way the Raptor looks. My cars are designed by the stopwatch."

Vette-ophiles will recognize the upper A-arms in the Mosler as well as the switches, dials, and things that go ping in the interior.

RICH CHENET

Mosler's stylistic sense is thus governed by his engineering determinism, for which he has no off switch. He looks at the Raptor's split window, which he says cleverly reduces frontal area and approaches the ideal angle of incidence with minimal solar gain, and sees a thing of beauty. Most everybody else sees an overturned rowboat.

In a less agile mind, this inability to tell a beautiful car from a stack of pancakes might be a tragic flaw. But Mosler has come to accept his blind spot, managed to make it a strength of character. "I know I can build a car that will win every race, but not a car that everyone will want to buy." This humility—and, likely, his economist's need to make a business case for his perennially money-losing enterprise, Mosler Automotive—made him receptive when Rod Trenne came calling.

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Trenne, 30, is among the first generation of automotive designers to set aside paper and clay and work entirely in cyberspace. As a junior member of the C5 Corvette design team back in 1994, Trenne stayed after hours at the office in Warren, Michigan, designing his dream supercar on the new Unigraphics Solutions software system. This is a staggeringly complex suite of design and engineering software that can execute solid modeling, kinematics analysis, and more, then spit all the math data out to toolmaking CNC machines. With the right wetware at the helm, Unigraphics can produce a whole car design, right down to the cigarette lighter, in less time than it used to take GM just to design that lighter.

Dave Hill and the C5 team had purchased a Mosler to crash-test the sandwich composite in the monocoque. Trenne was so impressed by the car that he wrote an admiring letter to Mosler in November 1995 proposing the two throw in to build Trenne's cybercar—a lurid, mid-engined exotic looking a lot like a Ferrari F50.

"I thought, all this guy needs is a good design," says Trenne, a die-hard Vette enthusiast. "I told him I had this package that will fit his engineering." He sent detailed computer-generated renderings of his car.

With typical concision, Mosler wrote back: "Let's do it."

Trenne went to Unigraphics looking for financing and UGS counterproposed. "They wanted to break into the car-design side of the business," says Trenne. "Tony Affuso [UGS V-P of products and operations] said, 'You come to work for us and we'll help you with your car.'" In exchange for Trenne's services, Unigraphics is allowed to use the MT900 to pitch other car companies on its services as an outside design house. Trenne, a salaried employee of Unigraphics, got marquee billing: MT900 stands for "Mosler Trenne" and 900 kilograms, the target weight (which, unfortunately, the car misses by 600-odd pounds).

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In a stroke, Mosler acquired access to a $100 million piece of software and the eye of a trained and talented car stylist. And the price—free—appealed to Mosler's inner economist. In this way Mosler was able to produce a running prototype for only about $500,000.

Mosler and Trenne shared common carbuilding values: lightweight, mid-engined monocoque design and heavy reliance on pre-engineered parts and performance from the OEMs to save costs. The MT900 is powered by a 1998 Corvette LS1 5.7-liter V-8 channeled through a Porsche ZF six-speed gearbox—turned upside down and backward to accommodate the mid-engine placement—and otherwise plagiarizes heavily from the Book of Bowling Green.

350-hp LS1 Vette motor

RICH CHENET

However, Mosler and Trenne saw the skin quite differently.

The biggest disagreement involved the canopy. Mosler insisted that the MT900 have a split windshield with two flat facets, like the piteously unsexy Raptor. Mosler made his case about angle of incidence, solar gain, and so forth, and would not be moved. Trenne was horrified. "Whether it was aerodynamic or not didn't matter," says Trenne. "It was an image thing."

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It seemed Mosler wasn't going to make an attractive car without putting up a fight.

Only days from the toolmaking stage, Trenne put his foot down, practically boycotting until he got a curved windshield. Eventually, Mosler was persuaded.

After seven major styling overhauls in virtual reality, Trenne e-mailed the body's math data to UCAR Composites in Irvine, California, where the numbers were fed into a toolmaking machine. Out came the buck, or "plug," on which to lay up the carbon-fiber body. Back in Riviera Beach, Mosler's workers produced the panels, and when they bolted them onto the chassis, "everything fit perfectly," says Mosler. "Once again, math works."

The result is a handsome, quietly outrageous exotic with the phrenology of a GT1 race car. The greenhouse swells from a more or less flat deck, with radiused shoulders falling off to nearly flat sides. The decklid behind the louvers is slightly concave (for a measure of downforce at speed, says Trenne, but he's not sure how much, how fast). The sail area aft of the windows is masked out with matte black paint. The engine breathes through a roof-mounted intake and . . . hmm, that sounds familiar.

Indeed. Proof that every silver lining comes with a dark cloud, the wraps are coming off Mosler's MT900 at the same time Steve Saleen is rolling out his new supercar, the S7, a wildly aggressive, damnably attractive $375,000 exotic with more gills than the San Diego aquarium.

Compared with the Cuisinart-inspired Saleen, the Mosler displays a certain lack of surface excitement -- in fact, there are areas of outright dullness, particularly in the nose of the car. This may be an artifact of the Unigraphics system, which emphasizes light "continuity," wherein reflected light plays across an object uninterrupted as that object rotates in space. Message to designers: Don't throw away the clay yet.

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It also implies Mosler's own instinct for super-clean aerodynamics, his loathing of art for art's sake. There are only two sets of gill-like vents, over the front wheels. Whether this is enough exotic lah-de-dah for the supercar-buying public remains to be seen, although the reported drag coefficient of 0.25 will appeal to connoisseurs of fluid dynamics.

The first thing we notice about the MT900 is that pictures don't do it justice. The car has presence, even menace, particularly when crouched on its 20-inch, five-spoke HSE aluminum alloy wheels that are wrapped with 40-series Dunlop SP9000s (although our testing was conducted with 18-inch shaved radials from Hoosier).

The prototype MT900 is no rough draft, either. Nearly everything -- windows, switches, gauges -- works. The scissors doors spring open at the touch (it has Corvette door handles) and slam shut with a rattle-free whoomf. The nose-cone boot is finished and carpeted, as is the small compartment in the car's tail.

The doors fit into cutouts in the roof to make it easier to get in and out. But the greenhouse is so far inboard and the threshold so wide that passengers may feel a little like they are shimmying over a pommel horse. For the driver, the reach is even farther, because the cockpit is asymmetrical, 60/40 in favor of the driver, whose right-seat bolster is on the car's center line. Although this was done to improve outward visibility, it also puts the driver's data-gathering bum very near the car's center of gravity.

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Not all was glitch-free in the translation from cyberspace. To free up more room, the seats had to be lowered. It was necessary to dig a shallow hole in the car's monocoque floor. Headroom is now exceptionally good.

As will surprise no one who has driven a Mosler car, the interior design has gotten short shrift so far. Mosler's interior engineer, Englishman Andy Harrison -- a veteran of Lotus, McLaren, and Vector -- designed and stitched up an interim interior using Bridge of Weir leather and Ultrasuede but was obliged to use donor parts from the Corvette's interior. "Ideally, I would do an interior that surpasses the design style of something like an Audi TT," says Harrison. "But I'd need a budget to do that, wouldn't I?"

RICH CHENET

The Corvette pedals were tortured somewhat to fit the Mosler foot box. When it was discovered the lever arms were too long, they were cut down. Shortening them has thrown their leverage out of whack, and it now takes huge thigh pressure to clutch. Meanwhile, the brake arm angles over the clutch, making it easy to get your feet tangled among the pedals. Revising the pedal assembly is high on the honey-do list.

The decklid clamshells open to reveal the LS1 motor with its twin throttle bodies being fed by cloth-wrapped intake ducts plumbed to the roof intake, a la McLaren. The prototype was running a little hot at Sebring. It seems air was skipping past the longitudinal body vent away from the inlet for the side rads. An air-gathering lip of some kind may be retrofitted. Maybe some shark gills?

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Under the skin, the monocoque tub is fashioned out of one-inch honeycombed aluminum with a resin laminate. Fore and aft of this high-tech piece of origami are subframes constructed of 1.75-inch-by-1.0-inch chrome-moly steel. To fashion the unequal-length A-arm suspension, Mosler used the Corvette's aluminum front upper A-arms at all four corners and welded lower arms out of the rectangular chrome-moly steel.

Two-way adjustable Penske coil-over shocks and adjustable-blade anti-roll bars stabilize the wheels, which brandish 14-inch-disc Brembos and dual-pot calipers. Mosler's GM electronics geek has managed to reprogram the ABS and traction control for the car's lighter weight; however, the active-handling stability-control system is disabled.

In the center of the action is the LS1 engine, almost unmolested from the donor car. Mosler estimates its current output is 350 hp at 5600 rpm, up from 345 due to the slightly less restrictive Corsa exhaust used in the MT. Torque remains 350 pound-feet at 4400 rpm. Thanks to the Corvette's Z06 program, it would be a simple matter to turn up the wick on the Mosler another 10 percent simply by installing the hotter Z06 heads and valvetrain, which raise the output of the 346-cubic-inch motor to 385 hp at 6000 rpm and 385 pound-feet of torque at 4800 rpm.

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We were a little apprehensive about hot-lapping the only MT900, but the car turned out to be a pussycat. With a twist of the key, the car comes to life with a smoky- and honey-voiced rumble. The aluminum honeycomb, beyond being really stiff, offers surprising amounts of noise abatement. Rap the engine, and the Corsa exhaust rips into the upper registers with a caffeinated snarl.

The Porsche ZF tranny is geared dramatically shorter than the Corvette's MM6 box, so stepping off in first gear (3.82:1) with a couple grand on the tach swats you into your seat quite firmly. But the Mosler doesn't ever feel harsh. This uber-Vette feels unstrained and liberated from an unwanted 650 pounds, surging silkily ahead like a runner who has just dropped his ankle weights.

Be careful grabbing that second gear, though. The short-throw stick and long linkage to the rear of the tranny make for some balkiness. Once in third, the LS1's natural tractability takes over, dishing up loads of good-natured torque from corner to corner, from entry to exit. Blast the gas exiting the corner, and the car slides sweetly and progressively into oversteer, the traction control staying well offstage until needed (it never was).

With three inches of suspension travel on both ends, the Mosler isn't a supple touring car, for sure. Initial jounce through the Penske coil-overs is crisp, and a big hit -- as you might find on the ragged tarmac of Sebring -- can easily rattle the door panels and maybe your teeth. But more important is rebound. The MT900 takes a hit and just swallows it, staying planted and settled, with little heaving around in corners. Nice. High-g cornering behavior is nearly flat and fear-free, with just enough limberness in the suspension to keep it from feeling like a skate.

RICH CHENET

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Mid-engined cars are inherently neutral and reactive, but in the Mosler, owing to the ultra-low seat height (a mere two inches above the 5.5-inch ride height) and the nearly centered driver's position, all the roll, pitch, dive, and yaw data come in at cable-modem speeds. Strangely, the car reminds of the Acura NSX in its sophisticated envelope of driver feedback.

Not all is beer and skittles. The Vette rack-and-pinion steering made the jump to the MT900, but the variable-assist apparently did not. The power-steering boost is set on "parallel parking" mode, so it was hard to judge the car's turn-in or steering feel through this watery and numb linkage to the front wheels.

Nonetheless, we got out of the car amazed that it is so nearly right, so early.

But back to Warren's question: Will it sell? Mosler -- the E.F. Hutton of vanity carbuilders -- glumly predicts the economy is about to go into the toilet (check out his Web site, www.warrenmosler.com). So it's entirely possible the burgeoning supercar market is about to get a cramp. To compete for the remaining buyers, Mosler will have to fare well in racing. He is also prepared to build MT900Rs for folks with $119,000 lying around.

Or he may sell none at all. In which case Mosler, filthy-rich bugger that he is, just won't build them. Financial independence is a beautiful thing.